Brian Eno Quotes
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Instruments sound interesting, not because of their sound, but because of the relationship a player has with them. Instrumentalists build a rapport with their instruments, which is what you like and respond to.
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The problem with improvisation is, of course, that everyone just slips into their comfort zone and does sort of the easy thing to do, the most obvious thing to do with your instrument.
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Any constraint is part of the skeleton that you build the composition on - including your own incompetence.
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Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive.
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Well, there are some things that I just can't get out of my head, and they start to annoy me after a while. Sometimes they're of my own creation, as well - and they're just as annoying. It's not only other people's ear worms that bug me, it's my own, as well.
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Since I have always preferred making plans to executing them, I have gravitated towards situations and systems that, once set into operation, could create music with little or no intervention on my part. That is to say, I tend towards the roles of planner and programmer, and then become an audience to the results.
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You can hear the profile of a sound, in retrospect, so much more clearly than you did at the time. And I think one of the things that's going to be nauseatingly characteristic about so much music of now is its glossy production values and its griddedness, the tightness of the way everything is locked together.
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If something is good, you must torture it mercilessly until it is either dead or great.
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With recording, everything changed. The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one's furniture. It's an idea that many composers have felt reluctant about because it seemed to them to diminish the importance of music.
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For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.
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I want to rethink 'surrender' as an active verb.
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If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas.
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A way to make new music is to imagine looking back at the past from a future and imagine music that could have existed but didn't. Like East African free jazz, which as far as I know does not exist.
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I think we're about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.
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I want to make something that is breathtaking. Of course, you can't make something that is always breathtaking, or you would never be able to breathe. You would collapse.
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I've noticed a terrible thing, which is I will agree to anything if it's far enough in the future.
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When I went back to England after a year away, the country seemed stuck, dozing in a fairy tale, stifled by the weight of tradition.
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The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.
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My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.
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When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks.'
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You can't really imagine music without technology.
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Most game music is based on loops effectively.
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My guitar only has five strings 'cause the top one broke and I decided not to put it back on: when I play chords I only play bar chords, and the top one always used to cut me there.
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We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.